Z80 Explorer – a Zilog Z80 netlist-level simulator - <AUTHOR> https://baltazarstudios.com/z80explorer/ <comment><USER2> This is nuts. I learned Z80 as a kid and wrote tens of thousands of lines of code in it.

This isn't just emulating the ISA, but the actual transistors. I could basically load the schematics of the Z80 on my computer and run it. That blows my mind. If Moore's law keeps going, the simulation will be running at 2MHz in a few years and I guess I could play Meteor Mission II on it.

For some reason this really makes me feel very strongly that this is a simulator... _within a simulator_.

<comment><AUTHOR> See also: Full simulation of MOS 6502 [0] by the Visual6502 team. The same team also did works on the Z80 [1], and it's actually the basis of the Z80 simulator presented in this article.

[0] [http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html](http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html)

[1] [http://visual6502.org/JSSim/expert-z80.html](http://visual6502.org/JSSim/expert-z80.html)

<comment><USER3> Shameless plug: I did a WASM "visual6502 remix" a little while ago with an integrated assembler and "execution history" (mostly for fun, but also because I found the original UI a bit hard to use for my emulator experiments, so I guess it was the same motivation as the Z80 Explorer project):

[https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/](https://floooh.github.io/visual6502remix/)

Eventually I want to do a version using the Z80 netlist of the visual6502 project as well (the actual transistor simulation code should remain the same, I used a C port of the visual6502 Javascript code called 'perfect6502'):

[https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502](https://github.com/mist64/perfect6502)

...I heard though that not all 'trap transistors' which should protect the Z80 from reverse engineering had been found and 'neutralized' in that netlist, so even though the ZEX test is running I'm not entirely sure whether the simulation still contains hidden problems (neither ZEXDOC nor ZEXALL have complete "coverage" of the Z80).

</comment></comment></comment><comment> tech-historian Small factoid. Microsoft's first foray into hardware was the Z80 Softcard for Apple ][, which was a plug in card that introduced Z80 and 6502 functionality. This was in 1980 and cost $365. A premium version also added 16k of RAM to the Apple ][ line.

[https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued- micros...](https://www.versionmuseum.com/history-of/discontinued-microsoft- hardware)

<comment><USER4> I've used that, a few years later, and really enjoyed it. At the time I've used it Turbo Pascal for CP/M was also available and it was pure magic, practically instantaneous compared to anything else. Even then, that environment allowed me to write the program in the editor, compile it and run all in RAM, even if the RAM was smaller than 64 KB. I'd write something new, press just a few keys, and it either runs and writes the output or it brings me back to the editor and the line with an error, without any additional steps. The last time I've checked, not even the latest IDEs did the last step so smoothly -- I'd have to click around in the output window before.

<comment><USER5> This is getting a bit off-track now, but I did use Turbo Pascal in the mid eighties (on an Amstrad CPC464) too. That sure was an impressive tool, but it seems to get more impressive as more time passes (and progress in IDEs trails, perhaps inflated, expectations).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Thanks to the author for this OCD-level work. I always find it interesting that netlists out of die images are precise enough to run hardcore test routines.

Z80 has a special place in my heart because of Speccy.

<comment><USER3> To give proper credit (I think it's also mentioned in the blog post), the Z80 netlist was actually extracted by the visual6502 project. The data files are available in the visual6502 github repository:

[https://github.com/trebonian/visual6502](https://github.com/trebonian/visual6502)

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> I love this project, having done a fair bit of Z80 programming myself. For all it's baroqueness, the Z80 is still in common use in high schools and universities in the form of TI-84 calculator series. Looks like this project has a ZX Spectrum display emulator, it would be interesting to see if other peripherals would be possible as well.

</comment><comment><USER8> Why not make a Verilog extractor? Then we can simulate it with standard tools. I'm pretty sure Verilog can simulate NMOS since it has pullups.

Another option is to extract a Spice netlist.

<comment><USER9> Generally speaking, Verilog simulation tools don't support the transistor- level primitives. You have to move up to at least the gate level to get something that'll simulate at all; even then, certain special combinations of gates (like registers) have to be specifically recognized to break combinational loops.

<comment><USER10> This was done for the 6502 from the Visual 6502 netlist, I suspect it could be done from the Z80:

[http://www.aholme.co.uk/6502/Main.htm](http://www.aholme.co.uk/6502/Main.htm)

But it does look like a lot of work, and it's not like you get especially readable Verilog from it.

Given other people have already built cycle accurate cores for these processors that are readable and maintained, it may not be worth it.

<comment><USER9> The 6502 conversion was especially difficult, as the processor made use of some wacky analog tricks (like capacitive storage) which can't be represented in Verilog at all. The author of that conversion had to do a great deal of manual work to detect these features and convert them to digital logic.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/blog/you-want-to-see-my-data-i-thought-we-were-friends <comment><USER2> One big problem is that journals agree to publish studies _after_ they are completed, which means that publication in prestigious journals is based on the novelty of the result rather than on the validity of the study/experiment. It's an absolute fundamental of science that you go into it with an open mind, admitting that you do not know what the result will be. A good study/experiment is not one which produces an interesting result, it's one which is properly designed to answer the question it's asking. Evaluating the quality of studies/experiments based on their results is an anti-scientific practice which should be excised like the cancerous tumor it is. The best way to do that is to accept and commit to publish studies/experiments based solely on their design, _before_ the experiment/study has actually been performed.

<comment><USER3> I like what you're saying. Do you (or anyone on this thread) have any comments/thoughts on the following?

During a conversation with an academic researcher (non-Computer Science) friend, when I brought up the topic of data sharing, especially in context of the infamous "replication crisis", they have their reasons not sharing. I'm loosely paraphrasing here, while trying hard not to misrepresent/misremember their exact views:

"I want to protect my data; I don't have enough time to present my data in a presentable form; and more importantly, they'll just steal my idea and go present it as theirs—and I might lose funding" ... and so on.

I can empathize with the academic pressure of "publish or perish". And not least of all, "need some food on the table, and roof over my head".

But I still wonder, there must be other effective ways to gently persuade a said researcher (especially in the 'soft sciences'—I'm not using the term derogatorily) on the importance of sharing data that allows reproducibility of a given experiment?

<comment><USER2> To be honest, I don't think this is going to be solved from the bottom up. I think a lot of scientists know that they are making compromises between doing science and pursuing their career. But we can't reasonably ask people to do better science when better science means living on an adjunct salary for the rest of their life. The change has to come from publishers.

The replication crisis will continue until publishers incentivize replication.

<comment><USER3> One researcher-friend did admit of the compromise you speak of, and the internal struggle that goes with it.

What remains is the "small matter" of persuading the publishers to action.

<comment><USER2> That may work with some publishers--MIT Press in particular seems particularly amenable to change, probably because their funding isn't dependent on the popularity of their publications. But the profit-motivated publishers who have a "working" business model aren't going to be persuaded to change it easily. We've watched hundreds of brick and mortar video stores and newspapers go out of business rather than step into the future--if history is any teacher here, the Elseviers of the world will go bankrupt rather than change.

And that's a good thing. A revolution in academic science led by Elsevier would be like King George leading the American Revolution. Real fundamental change isn't going to come from the profiteers who caused the problem in the first place.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> A lot of the problems in academia, I believe, come from incompetence, a lack of questioning or at least of doubting others' competence and your own competence, and reliance on unsound ideas about scientific methodology. Andrew Gelman has some good thoughts here that I feel are related:

[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/07/29/the- crooks...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/07/29/the-crooks-get- the-headlines-but-the-real-problem-is-bad-science-done-by-non-crooks/)

Some people will have the best of intentions, they will really be doing "science" out of the goodness of their hearts and out of their desire to help mankind, but they'll end up publishing trash that gets acceptance and sometimes even praise.

What are the incentives that need to be instilled to fix the problems we currently have? I'd say we need to incentivize competence and humility. How? I don't know exactly, but values like these seem to be able to be instilled through cultural practices and traditions.

Also, especially humility seems to be lacking from many cases of bad science. If people accepted criticism and accepted that they don't really understand all that much, I believe scientific quality would improve. You do have a lot of reasons to not be humble in academia though, as this comic lays out.

<comment><USER5> > I'd say we need to incentivize competence and humility.

Problem is I think that the competent are few, and when the cultural norm is that they must be humble then they stand no chance against the many incompetent.

IM(H)O: Science shouldn't be humble in the face of non-science. As long as it is it will lose. The idea of conflict free great science is a pipe dream. We need a culture that accepts (intellectual) conflict.

<comment><USER6> > the cultural norm is that they must be humble then they stand no chance > against the many incompetent

I don't think this is a cultural norm so much as just the Dunning-Kruger effect [1] in play. People who are highly competent still realize there is much they don't know, and that makes them humble. I suspect if you go and find someone widely recognized as an expert in pretty much any field, and ask them if they know all there is to know, you'll find no one says yes.

[1] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effec...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect)

<comment><USER5> I don't know... I often feel like we're talking about many kinds of humility at once. You seem to be talking more about "epistemological humility", while I was talking more about "social humility".

Was Richard Feynman humble?

<comment><USER4> Yes, from what I've read of him, he was humble in quite a few ways.

<comment><USER5> I agree: He was very humble before reality (as all good scientists have to be). But I argue he wasn't very "socially humble"...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I generally agree, but their solution (fund boring research, publish only in journals with high standard) is in direct contrast to what they stated earlier. It's basically saying yes, we have bad incentives, but we could ignore them. That's not going to happen; shiny new research _will_ attract people and funding. Especially more than "boring" _what we found before was indeed a finding_ -research.

Now, I don't have a good solution either, unfortunately. What might work is that we require replication work for a PhD or have a certain percentage of a journal dedicated to verification. That, combined with some meta-studies to reward people with citations for replication, might work without fully swimming against the current.

It's a hard problem, really.

<comment><USER8> Tyler Cowen writes [0] that the most important question in economics, to him, is

> how do differences of culture — however defined — interact with traditional > economic mechanisms involving prices, incomes, and simple comparative > statics? Are those competing explanations, namely cultural vs. economic?

Richie's answers are mostly focused on changing the culture of science, and while there are lots of ways we could change the incentives, none of them would be pretty.

Example: let's say we want to more closely align research and actionable results, e.g., a product a company can use (Brian Armstrong argues for something like this [1]).

Solution: radically reduce public funding for scientific research and for university education as a whole (in line with Bryan Caplan's arguments in "The Case Against Education" [2]). Academics, who would be many fewer in number, would then have to get more of their funding from companies, who (presumably) would:

A) guide them towards asking market-relevant questions, and

B) have a clear incentive to check the data, re-run the code, etc. -- so that the product they built based on that research didn't flop.

I think most people would recoil at this proposal. But that's what comes to mind when I think about fixing the incentives rather than the culture.

P.S. Small nitpick: Richie gives an _example_ of a perverse incentive in lieu of a definition.

[0] [https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/im...](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/01/important- unsolved-problems-field.html)

[1] [https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve- scien...](https://medium.com/@barmstrong/ideas-on-how-to-improve-scientific- research-9e2e56474132)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Case_Against_Education)

<comment><USER9> If you think funding from industry makes academics' results more robust, you might want to look into tobacco-industry-funded research on cancer, oil- industry-funded research on global warming, and ridesharing-industry-funded research on drivers' working conditions.

<comment><USER10> No one thinks "research on drivers' working conditions" is science. Manifestly self-interested nonsense like that is relatively easily ignored. And if that's the trade we make to get Bell Labs, Xerox Parc and IBM Research, I'll take it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't know if the comic properly represents the book, but all of the suggestions are somewhere between ridiculous and useless.

First, about identifying bad research: The "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" is already practiced. It's not that "we've overturned quantum theory" articles that are causing problem - those are quickly and effectively shot down. And it is rare that the "perfectly aligns with a political interest" can be applied. The only actionable one is "see what others think about it", and it's no panacea either.

Bad and fraudulent science like the recently retracted Surgisphere covid paper is abundant. I was trying to track down the origin of the "reduce salt intake" and "limit egg consumption to no more than 2 per day / 2 per week" recommendation in the past, assuming there was hard science behind them. There isn't; and indeed they're slowly being reversed everywhere - but they were prevalent for half a century, with a lot of other research taking them as axioms.

The remdesivir trials have been p-hacked to death - anyone who took an interest was seeing it happen in real time - yet, the scientific community turns a blind eye.

The ketogenic diet is vilified in every mainstream media and most nutritional "science" publications; the headlines are rarely inline with the the actual results, but that's what people remember (Not that nutrition science is really science)

And the other recommendations about fixing it are comparable to "lets solve evils of the US 2-party system! All we have to do is make those two parties vote to take away their power". Academia and science publishing are where they are now because it benefits essentially all the incumbents (at the expense of the rest of society).

The problem description (at least in the comic) is good. Any suggested action ... not so much.

<comment><USER12> I think the suggestion that "universities could change their hiring policies" is a very good recommendation. There are a lot of problems in academia (bad research, lack of diversity, pressure to publish) that could be reduced if universities changed their hiring policy to something further away from the metric of (number of papers published since receiving PhD) / (time since receiving PhD). Of course no university hires explicitly on that metric, but many of the metrics they use are not far from that, mixing in quality of journals and norms for the field, etc.

Each of the suggested actions, taken together, would seem to have a very positive improvement on the status quo. Would you care to explain why the suggested actions would be "somewhere between ridiculous and useless?"

<comment><USER13> Not OP here, but my issue with the recommendations are that they've pretty accurately listed a whole bunch of mostly structural problems with academia, but all of the suggestions boil down to "we all just need to try harder". You can _say_ something like: "journals need to demand higher standards" but what incentive do they actually have to do so? Then you can counter with "scientists could vote with their feet", but what incentives do they have to do that?? You're asking people to consider seriously damaging their career for some nebulous quality metric.

Frankly, having worked in academia long enough to see at least a couple shifts in culture, the only thing I can see that comes out of this is a couple more things get added on to the ever growing checklist of publishing a paper/submitting a grant application.

I think we need to get away from the sort of thinking where large structural problems can be solved by tiny incremental improvements. If you really want to solve the problem, one or more of [Granting Agencies|Journals|Universities] has to be completely torn down and built back up.

<comment><USER12> It seems to me, still, that a lot of these problems you bring up can be addressed by universities changing their hiring policies. Which makes sense: academics ultimately rely on universities for their income, and so it is the hiring policies which are setting the perverse incentives. And I don't think changing hiring policies would be an incremental change, it would be a huge change (and not likely to be made by any university any time soon, since students rank universities on similar metrics to how universities hire staff — a prestigious university will lose prestige even if it changes its hiring policies for the better).

<comment><USER13> > academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

Sort of, a huge portion of income is from grants, particularly after the first few years from being hired. More importantly, a huge portion of the University income is from grants. When a researcher recieves a grant, there is an "overhead" percentage that goes to the University. Universities hire, in part, to maximize those overheads, which means getting the researchers with the best chance at getting big grants.

Changing the hiring process may affect how PHD students act, but once they're "in the system", they are subject to all the same problematic incentives.

<comment><USER14> > academics ultimately rely on universities for their income

In my decades at it (digital side of bioinformatics) the cash flow is in the other direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Zach Weinersmith's ability to tell compelling non-fiction via comics is something I truly love. He manages to take what the person is saying, convert it into a comic form of them saying it, while adding humour. And throughout the process, _what_ is being said does not seem to be degraded at all. There's also a level of openness we all seem to have to something that comes at us as a comic rather than hard text.

I don't even think we have a good word for what this practice is, but I'll go with "Art" because it takes a lot of that.

His book on Immigration[0] is a large-scale version of this skill in practice and I suspect a lot of HN readers might enjoy it, regardless of if you agree with his points or not.

[0][https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics- Immigrati...](https://www.amazon.com/Open-Borders-Science-Ethics- Immigration/dp/1250316960/)

</comment><comment><USER16> Is there something like negative-citation-index?

Where you spread refuted papers out through citations to other scientists and newspapers.

It could be included as a factor when hiring scientists.

And of course the person who refuted a false paper should receive the citations of that false paper. It's only fair.

<comment><USER17> Expanding on this, suppose there is an anti-journal, tentatively titled 'Journal of Bad Science', which features thoroughly refuted, bad-faith papers. Not just rejected papers, as the reasons can be as innocuous as a few spelling mistakes, but clearly and unambiguously bad research.

This would form the basis of the Crank Index of a paper, which can be simplified into a stoplight system: Good research with good sources is GREEN. Getting featured in the Journal of BS earns a paper the esteemed distinction of a blaring scarlet RED, citing a RED paper will mark a paper ORANGE, citing ORANGE research leaves you YELLOW... Throwing together lots of ORANGE and YELLOW citations will nudge your paper up the spectrum towards RED.

This would incentivize researchers to not only care about the quantity of the citations they share with each other, but to be extremely vigilant of the quality of those citations as well.

<comment><USER18> Let's say I cited a "red" paper and explained how and why they were wrong. Does my paper become "orange"? I hope not, but that would require a lot of rigorous manual verification by the journal editors...

<comment><USER16> Ideally papers would start citing using a new format that makes explicit the dependencies between papers.

For example:

        refutes: ...
        expands on: ...
        depends on: ...
        alternative approach to: ...

etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> This comic by Zach Weinersmith summarizes Stuart Ritchie's recent book _Science Fiction_. To combat the problem of low-quality science papers, one of the panels suggests:

> [journals] can demand scientists share their data, and to prove that they've > written down their analysis plans before they touch the data

I wonder if this doesn't gloss over a deeper underlying problem: journals have traditionally assumed the copyright of the paper. Journals themselves have an incentive to obfuscate and protect the underlying data and content.

Ultimately, any complex system or institution will be more susceptible to gaming when it is mature and its value proposition clearly established. Anti- gamification is hard to design into the early stages of a system when it is needed most.

<comment><USER20> [deleted]

<comment><USER21> The comic is the posted article.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> It's an excellent analysis of the fundamental problems in academia, but "people should just act against their incentives" isn't really a solution.

It really is the incentives themselves that are the problem: just looking at number of publications and citations (or even: citations of articles _in the journals that your articles happen to be published in as well_ ) when determine who to fund or hire.

The problem there is that we _have_ those metrics, are relatively quick and easy to obtain, which are accepted because they are what's been used so far - even though plenty of research has pointed out their flaws yet [1]. And anything new that is proposed as a replacement of those metrics (whether other metrics, or other systems of evaluation) is dismissed for not being proven to live up to a standard that the currently used methods do not either, or for not being available quickly or easily enough. (Which is reasonable - e.g. it's not viable to read and properly evaluate all research of your applicants.)

(Disclosure: I do volunteer for a project, [https://plaudit.pub](https://plaudit.pub), that tries to offer an alternative nevertheless.)

[1] [https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that- ca...](https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or- break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a)

</comment><comment><USER23> You need a better science publication platform. Like arxiv and github combined.

<comment><USER19> Arxiv, github, and a self-publishing style platform that supports reproducible digital artifacts, i.e., the published paper. IIRC, many flawed papers were the result of data errors saved in a spreadsheet.

<comment><USER23> And better citations. I want to be able to link to a particular sentence of a particular version of a paper.

Also pull requests.

<comment><USER24> Could you explain what the sentence-level citation adds?

I've heard several people ask for this, but never understood why. Most citation formats let you include page numbers; you can usually work in other location information ("See Foo et al. (2020)'s Figure 3A") too.

<comment><USER23> Maybe but most people dont do it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think the core problem is our ignorance of psychology - we don't know how humans really work, what makes us tick, what are the 'incentives' that should be put in system design to move toward better science, and whether 'incentives' are even a good conceptualization of human motivation. We will not fix science until we understand what makes scientists behave as they do, and until we figure out how to design systems for humans. Though, Maybe we stumble upon a better system via blind variation in system properties and selective retention, based on some novel metric. Scientific psychology is rather weak in explaining and predicting how humans will behave.

</comment><comment><USER26> Nobody in the world gets to do the "fun" part of their job more than a fraction of their time. I don't think scientists are uniquely hard done by here. They are enormously more privileged than the vast majority of people, being funded to do something purely speculative, it's not too much to ask them to publish it so others can benefit from that spending too - which largely comes from taxpayers doing less fulfilling jobs.

</comment><comment><USER27> I can't help but wonder how many of the issues with scientific papers couldn't be solved with technology. The notion that science is so deeply rooted in antiquated concepts like paper journals and academic constructs like tenure is absurd when the internet has been around for as long as it has.

For example, imagine if scientific papers were voted up or down by a community, kind of like stack overflow.

Or imagine if scientific papers had to publish all of their source materials and instructions for replicating the experiment, and there was a system for tracking and showing whether or not the experiment had been validated or disproven?

What if you "game-ified" scientific papers and gave people points for publishing, but also gave people twice as many points for disproving a paper?

Imagine if we had a platform for tracking scientific theories and experiments that was a combination of democratic/meritocratic administration (like wikipedia), change logging/tracking (like github), and reputation management (like stack overflow)...

</comment><comment><USER28> The fixes they propose are good ones, but aren't grounded in reality. They ignore how we got here in the first place. Citations matter as a proxy for importance. Negative studies are inherently uninteresting. Companies fund groundbreaking work because they want to be associated with a breakthrough. Scientists publish in bad journals because their careers depend on it - it's an entire lifetimes work to get tenure and research grants. They can't just throw that away. Journals publish lousy studies because they don't have enough good ones - the journals will not self destruct in order to slim down for us.

To fix the system will take a more honest look at the incentives of the people/institutions who create the incentives, and so on.

</comment><comment><USER29> paraphrasing to emphasize irony:

"Science should be based on solid data: published, auditable, peer-reviewed numbers. Data is good, data is objective, data is truth.

"Academic hiring is broken. We can't base academic hiring on numbers because people game the numbers. In academic hiring we need to be subjective, to evaluate the intrinsic merit of each researcher. Data is corrupt, data isn't sufficiently subjective, data is flawed.

</comment><comment><USER30> A couple of years ago, Prof. Michael Stonebreaker gave a talk in ICDE (IEEE Intl. Conference on Data Engineering) 2018 in Paris on the problems of the pursuit of the "LPU", least publishable unit of work; and his impression that few people pursue deeper and more significant work because of this and other factors. If you can find a summary or a recording of that somehow, it's worthwhile to listen IMHO.

</comment><comment><USER31> What you like to see at the top of any article covering the press release of a study?

Something like an infobox with P-factor, whether it was pre-registered, sample size, funding organization, double-blind, etc?

This comic tackles the Academia side of things, but a lot of that motivation comes from press coverage. If the press has better capabilities to be critical of bad studies, Academia will give less credence to the same.

</comment><comment><USER32> Nothing proves that comic more than the current covid-19 'pandemic' which is largely based on fear and BS (bad science). The doctors and scientists that actually make sense get censored into obscurity while sensational and fear agenda promoting info gets published.

</comment><comment><USER33> There is no perfect solution, but requiring access to both the data and full methodology for experimental sciences should help.

Even problem sof cherry picked data would be partially exposed eventually; and eventual exposure is still a very effective deterrent in science. My 2c.

</comment><comment><USER34> One change that would help and easy to implement is reporting, for a researcher/paper, citations excluding self-citations.

This doesn't take care of citation rings, but does move the needle towards reporting the actual value of a paper/researcher.

</comment><comment><USER35> OK, so "Science Fictions" was just released and is full of cartoons and we have an obvious promotional push going on. But I simply must recommend the (possibly) more mundane (no comics) but nonetheless excellent David H. Freedman book:

 _" Wrong: Why experts_ keep failing us--and how to know when not to trust them _Scientists, finance wizards, doctors, relationship gurus, celebrity CEOs, ... consultants, health officials and more "_

[https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship- cons...](https://www.amazon.com/Wrong-us-Scientists-relationship- consultants/dp/0316023787)

which begins with an interview with John Ioannidis and goes on to discuss in detail why so many academic (and expert) publications are wrong and how they got that way.

<comment><USER19> Stuart Ritchie's book _Science Fictions_ was not illustrated by Zach Weinersmith, only the article was.

<comment><USER35> Oops! My bad! Then I recommend Freedman's book even more!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> I kindof think science isn't fixable. Maybe we can get it a little bit better but we just have to live with the suck. At least it makes some progress despite all the flaws.

</comment><comment><USER37> LOL, The annelida part killed me

</comment><comment><USER38> All of these problems plus low pay, why would anyone go into academia?

<comment><USER38> You can down vote me but I asked a serious question. There are certainly science careers that are not in academia.

Am I missing something? Is there great pay before you've taken a lot of time to move up the ladder, assuming you are fortunate enough?

Help me understand your reasoning rather than just down voting me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> I think all scientific papers should be written in this format.</comment>


Ask HN: Should I take time off while wife earns? - <AUTHOR> My wife is a recent MFT graduate has a pretty good shot at getting a job at a small mental health facility in a tiny town in Colorado. Her salary would be more than enough for where we will be living plus paying down student loans (3-4 times the median household income).
I've been getting burnt out in tech for closing in on a decade, now... or at least, working on other people's tech, I think.
Should I use this opportunity to step away from tech completely and invest in getting better at my other hobbies (carpentry, hiking, writing)? <comment> core-questions Sounds like a great opportunity. Just keep this in mind:

[http://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men- women/](http://time.com/4425061/unemployment-divorce-men-women/)

Looks like it causes a lot of couples relationship stress to have the wife be the primary breadwinner and the husband stay at home.

So, you need to make sure you're doing something to contribute financially (or equivalently via some other fruits of your labour) to the family, beyond just the standard work around the house. You don't have to earn more than your wife, but you must do your best to avoid any possible interpretation that you're doing nothing all day, or else you run an elevated risk of relationship issues.

<comment><AUTHOR> I'm less worried about this as my wife and I go to therapy together and separately, and she is a marriage and family therapist herself.

I'm more concerned about myself not being able to rejoin tech when I'm not burned out anymore, or losing skills (not that I have many currently, anyway).

<comment><USER2> Consider using your time off to take up a trade. Personally, I've found working with my hands outside of tech cathartic (welding specifically), and will eventually transition out to either a trade or law after tech (where there is no treadmill, and taking a year or two off doesn't sideline you permanently).

Tech is like being a sports athlete or exotic dancer; make hay while the sun is shining but always be prepared for your next act.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Honestly, men like beautiful women and women like rich men. Even if your wife is okay with it, it could be a hit to your attractiveness. It also means no more expensive gifts.

But otherwise, I have taken year long breaks from tech. There was no issue with being outdated; if you're the type to hang out on HN as a hobby, you should be fine. Interestingly, going back and looking at old code gave a lot of insights to what I was doing wrong.

The only issue I had was losing momentum on networking. If you go around rejecting work, they find someone else and people stop recommending you.

Also as someone who has taken a year off, I find that breaks don't cure burnout. Burnout is caused by not having an impact despite hard work. You probably won't have an impact on anyone's life by being good at hiking. It was teaching that brought me out of burnout.

</comment><comment><USER4> Why not switch to part time? Nothing is permanent. Try taking 3 months off and see if you like it.

</comment><comment><USER5> I don't think you necessary have to make a hard decision with what to do with your career/hobbies. These aren't mutually exclusive choices.

It sounds like you have the freedom to explore your options, and even try them out. You could get there and do some contract/remote work part-time while enjoying hobbies. You should try building products of your own. You could try to profit from your hobbies. You could take a sabbatical for a few months.

Good luck. Doesn't sound like you can make a wrong choice here.

</comment><comment><USER6> Is your wife okay with that arrangement? Do you feel you can get back into the workforce easily? If so, sure, sounds great!

<comment><AUTHOR> My wife and both of our therapists are on board with the idea of it. I'm just a little more hesitant. I've always had a job/gig/clients (except 2 months in 2008).

I'm a product development consultant (well I was, before my current role of ASP.Net code monkey), so getting new clients TODAY is difficult -- why I'm a code monkey.

We've always used my income to pay for our extravagances (multiple European vacations per year, a healthy retirement account, never having to look at the bank before we buy something, etc), so this will be different. Which has caused me to be a little hesitant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> You should take burnout seriously. And you should ask your wife what she thinks.

But if you have the opportunity to quit, then do it.

<comment><AUTHOR> She's all for it, I'm just more hesitant since I've never NOT had a paying job in our entire relationship. And she's never had a PAYING job. So we are both looking to flip roles.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> It's complicated and heavily depends on the type of relationships that you developed and even with perfect relationships it still may backfire. Can you make money from your hobbies (say, carpentry)? It's a far less stressful way for your family to have a year off your regular job.

</comment><comment><USER9> Yes! Consider drafting a plan with some defined goals/deliverables to keep you focused and efficient. Otherwise, such a break might morph into a pseudo- vacation. I can imagine where that might breed tension and frustration.

</comment><comment><USER10> Her money is her money except what you both put together for daily expenditures, shopping, savings, investments etc which obviously would be much bigger from her side than yours but rest is her wherever she would like to spend. SO YOU SHOULD NEVER see her income as an excuse to take time off. This will only increase tension b/w you guys and believe me this is real.

<comment><AUTHOR> That is a very negative viewpoint on marriage. We've been together for 14 years and I've been the only one with a job that entire time, and we've always shared the money.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> Yes

</comment><comment><USER12> No.

There is a gene sequence that women have (men may have it too FWIW) that causes them to be unhappy if their SO isn't "bringing home the bacon." Its an old sequence and is not to be tampered with unless you wish to end the relationship. It is somewhat akin to the "you must bring/buy/provide food on any date" gene, which will also, unless fulfilled, bring any date to an unscheduled premature end.

Just an aside: you'd have to be nuts to quit working to get better at hobbies, unless you're very, very good at the hobbies, plan to work (i.e., make money) in those hobbies and can earn as much income.

Do your best to spend time in the most highly-valued way you can - then you will not go wrong.</comment>


Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys - <AUTHOR> http://www.catonmat.net/blog/why-vim-uses-hjkl-as-arrow-keys/ <comment><USER2> Doesn't this go way back though?

The reason that keyboard had those arrows keys on it was because those keys correspond to CTRL-H, J, K, L and the CTRL key back then worked by killing bit 6 (and bit 5) of the characters being typed.

The effect was that H which is ASCII 0x48 would become 0x08 which is backspace. If you look at an ASCII table (e.g. <http://www.asciitable.com/>) you will notice how the uppercase ASCII letters line up nicely with the control characters so that just dropping bit 6 will get you there. Same thing with the lowercase (drop bits 5 and 6) and you are on the control characters.

The CTRL-H, J, K, L therefore correspond to BS, LF, VT, FF. BS is backspace (i.e. left), LF (down), VT is vertical tab (so up) and FF is form feed (which in this case takes you up). I'm not sure why FF was used for up.

This is also why CTRL-I is tab, CTRL-D ends a communication. All of that goes back to teletype days. Also for telnet users out there you'll see that CTRL-[ lines up nicely with ESC. And when you see a ^@ being printed on the terminal you can see why it corresponds to a null byte.

One other interesting thing about ASCII: uppercasing and downcasing can be done by twiddling a single bit.

If you look at this picture of an ASR-33 Teletype you'll see that come of the control characters on the keyboard correspond to those in the ASCII set. This is because ASCII evolved from the earlier teletype character sets: [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/ASR-33_2....](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/ASR-33_2.jpg)

<comment><USER3> This is correct, and the reason they used those keys was that it was the 'home row' on a typewriter which was used in teletypes which meant your little finger could push 'ctrl' and your right hand could drive the cursor through forms without moving off the home row.

When I saw the title I was expecting to see a picture of the rogue screen. Rogue (and later hack, and nethack) is a text displayed dungeon exploration game and was often the first exposure folks got to the convention of h,j,k,l as left right up down.

I _really_ miss having control over there. I xkeymap it there of course but some keyboards have a physically 'push-on/push-off' caps lock key there which is annoying.

<comment><USER4> Count me in the school of thought that the control key is meant to be to the left of the A key, just like the horn button is meant to be in the center of a car steering wheel. Every computer keyboard I worked with before the advent of IBM PCs had this arrangement. Every computer I work with now I reconfigure to swap the caps lock with the control key.

IT IS THE NATURAL ORDER OF THINGS.

<comment><USER5> It's a major frustration for me, too, as an Emacs user.

I'm still looking for a hardware dongle that does nothing but map the caps lock scan code to left ctrl. Sure, I can rebind the key (and I do) but as a contractor I move around a lot and having something that circumvents the OS entirely would come in handy.

<comment><USER6> I use a keyboard that has a similar layout to that in the images above (ctrl to left of A, tilde on home key at top right etc). It's called the Happy Hacking Keyboard and is made in Japan by a Fujitsu subsidiary: see here <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Hacking_Keyboard>. It's extremely expensive (~$300 or so) but has amazing key action and having gotten used to it I would never want to use anything else

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> ADM3a was a terminal, not a computer. I used to use these two in around 1976 or so. And the hjkl pattern has nothing to do with this or any other terminal. The ASCII control codes for Ctrl-H, Ctrl-J, Ctrl-K and Ctrl-L were used to make the Teletype's printing carriage move left, down, up or right. Bill Joy's innovation was "modes" so that Ctrl-H did not delete the character when it moved left, etc...

<comment><USER8>
      8 H backspace
      9 I tab (right a lot)
     10 J line feed (down)
     11 K vertical tab (down a lot)
     12 L form feed (down a page)
     13 M carriage return (left a line)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> Most of the answers I've seen as to why hjkl have fallen into the "so your fingers stay on the home row / it's actually quite fast once you get used to it" realm. But those answers were never completely satisfactory to me. Once you get used to it, it's fine. But I feel like it would have been fine as adsw, or jkl; (so that your hand really is on the home keys) or some other 4 key combination near the home row, too.

This explanation of the origin hjkl is the first one to satisfy me. Now I can see the others, not as explanations as to why it is, but explanations as to why it stuck.

<comment><USER10> I use JKLI. The two main advantages are that you don't use your pinky finger repetitively, and the layout of JKLI makes intuitive sense as to what each key does.

<comment><USER11> Once you get used to hjkl,it's pretty "intuitive" (in that you don't need to think about what you're doing).

<comment><USER12> Unless you use Dvorak. I know I'm in a super minority here. But shortcuts based on keyboard location rather than tied to some mnemonic are damn near impossible to get right. Doubly so when I have to switch to QWERTY to work with anyone else.

<comment><USER13> I switched cold turkey to Dvorak and Vim at practically the same time (what can I say, I like pain :) I learned Vim mnemonically and have no problem using Vim on QWERTY. At the same time, I could have just as easily learned it "locationally" and been screwed. Only chiming in because I think it's interesting that the learning curves for location-vs-mnemonic seem approximately equal, but the long-term payoff of one is much greater. Neat asymmetry.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Oh lord! I remember these unibody terminals. I had to use the Volker-Craig VC4404 . That thing was built like a tank. You had to hammer at the keys with great force. Soon one got into the habit of hammering on the keys all the time.

And then one day I walked into the lab with shiny new VT-100 terminals with their soft keys; but started hammering on them by habit. And everybody turned around and looked at me as if I was possessed..... :-D

<comment><USER15> I smiled when I saw how you call them "unibody" terminals. We have come a long way since then. :)

<comment><USER16> When my dad bought a DEC Rainbow 100, I loved loved loved that I could move the keyboard. Such a boon!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Perhaps just as enlightening is the location of the Esc key (to the left of Q): <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:KB_Terminal_ADM3A.svg>

<comment><USER18> I'm just learning vim and just yesterday I was wondering why they chose the escape key.

<comment><USER19> These days I mostly use Ctrl-C instead of Esc, just because it's so much easier to type.

If you make a serious commitment to vi(m) though, binding your capslock to esc is probably the better way to go.

<comment><USER20> I found ctrl there more useful. Especially for its use with other programs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> It would have been a lot more useful if the link had said how/why the ADM-3A used _hjkl_ as cursor keys.

<comment><USER22> For those reading this that don't know, it's so your hands stay on the "home row"

[Edit:] or at least that's what I thought, wavetossed's comment below provides interesting insight.

<comment><USER23> Then wouldn't have 'jkl;' made more sense? (assuming index fingers were placed on 'f' and 'j' back then as well)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I worry that the tone of the article seems dismissive of the choice that went into mapping those keys to arrow directions in vi ("That's the whole story"). As if to say it was mere happenstance that vi uses hjkl, and any other outcome was equally likely.

It seems more the case that the designers of that computer chose those particular keys on the basis of a desire for efficiency that vi also followed, so there was no need to create a new convention.

<comment><USER25> The "article" is barely three full sentence and includes two images. To me it clearly states why hjkl were chosen as the keys for navigating around the editor.

How does the author's "That's the whole story!" ending make you feel like he's saying hjkl being used as the navigation keys was a coincidence?

<comment><USER24> Honestly perhaps it's partly a defensive reaction about a tool I like. If so, my bad. Maybe I can't help but feel like the "article" could be perceived as saying "see, vim chose these keys simply because that's what the keyboard said without any thought toward efficiency". The idea that they're chosen for efficiency seems so self-evident that it doesn't need a flourish to reveal. It's likely I'm thinking too hard about it. In any case, it is a neat little bit of history and the link gets my upvote.

<comment><USER26> Maybe "efficiency" is implied, since folks using the initial version of vi would be used to using those keys for navigation anyway. So, I read this more as "Bill Joy used a convention" rather than "Bill Joy chose the most efficient keys for touch typists."

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> I've got one of those sitting in my spare room... I'd be using it right now were it not for a busted flyback, which emits a whine capable of giving me a headache within 15 minutes. It's really a rather nice terminal, with an oddly attractive screen font and a keyboard that is well-suited to UNIX.

The coolest part is that there is no microprocessor, just a bunch of 7400 series ICs and some DIP switches to configure things.

</comment><comment><USER28> If anyone is apprehensive about vim's hjkl keys, and you like the arrow keys better, you can use ijkl instead and get all the benefits of the muscle memory you have built up for arrow keys, while still keeping your hands on the home row. Use this mapping:

        " remap h to i and use ijkl for inverse T cursor movement
        map k g<Down>
        map i g<Up>
        map j <Left>
        noremap h i

Then the 'i' key will be replaced by 'h'. So press 'h' to insert, or for inner selections, instead of 'i'. Also note the 'g' for up/down motions, which means it won't skip the wrapped part of lines - just remove the 'g' if you don't like that.

If you're worried this breaks anything else, I've had this interfere with just one other thing: a plugin that let me select text based on indentation of the line the cursor was on, but I made a few minor changes to the vimfile for the plugin and fixed that pretty easily. The other thing is that random servers won't have these mapped, but just copy the config over if you'll be doing a lot of text editing on that server. Otherwise, you can just fall back to using hjkl awkwardly.

<comment><USER29> I'd recommend the opposite. If you're apprehensive about hjkl, force yourself to use it anyway!

      " disable arrow keys
      nnoremap <Up> <nop>
      nnoremap <Down> <nop>
      nnoremap <Left> <nop>
      nnoremap <Right> <nop>

<comment><USER28> I didn't advocate using arrow keys, but rather using ijkl. Your suggestion is not mutually exclusive with my own, you can do both. :)

Though I guess the mappings I provided would have to be noremap instead of map.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Another reason to use HJKL is that over a 1200bauds line, it is faster to send a single byte than the 3 bytes generated by the arrow keys (^[[D^[[A^[[B^[[C)

<comment><USER31> The ADM3A was a "dumb" terminal, constructed using a board full of 7400-series TTL ICs with no microcontroller. Probably to simplify the design, it wasn't capable of sending any multi-character escape sequences. (The ANSI escape sequences hadn't been standardized at that point yet either.)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> The ADM-3A was a dumb terminal (well, it had to have had some level of screen addressibility, but was definitely not ANSI-compatible), not a computer. They were sold as kits, and about 1/3 the price of a VT-100. I remember reading somewhere that they were the first glass teletypes available to the BSD folks, and Bill Joy wrote vi purely because it allowed him to monopolize one for his own use.

<comment><USER33> Yes, in addition to the cursor movement control characters, there was a single escape sequence for moving to a specified row and column. I didn't know they were sold as kits. Did you buy a kit?

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> You will find similar reasons for why Emacs chose many of its common keys if you examine the [Space Cadet keyboard](<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space- cadet_keyboard>) for which it was designed.

All those awkward Control reaches originally laid comfortably under the thumbs.

</comment><comment><USER35> So, since the vast majority of users didn't start out on that keyboard, the reason to keep doing it that way now is: tradition.

</comment><comment><USER36> This feature of vi/vim along with not being able to save and quit as quickly as I can in emacs (ctrl-s ctrl-x, baby, none of that :q! shite) is the reason I use emacs. I totally respect those that use vim, but I'm not a freaking machine.

<comment><USER37> To save with [Esc],w add the following to your ~/.vimrc

      " remap <Leader> to ,
      let mapleader = ","

      " save with ,w
      nmap <Leader>w :w<CR>

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> I'm actually glad it worked out that way, I hate using the regular, out-of- the-way arrow keys. They're even more annoying than the mouse.

<comment><USER39> Just never decide to learn dvorak.

<comment><USER27> This is good advice in all situations, having watched my bandwagon-jumping friends flail helplessly when using anyone else's computer. And all for a small potential increase in speed, at the cost of making your computer unusable to others and completely screwing the convenience of most keyboard shortcuts.

<comment><USER39> > at the cost of making your computer unusable to others

I have a qwerty guest keyboard next to my Kinesis Advantage. Also dvorak isn't necessarily that faster, but rather more comfortable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I'm used to H, J, K, L now. But when I wasn't aware of the history of vi, I always wondered why on earth he didn't use J, I, K, L!

</comment><comment><USER41> I wonder if being right-handed also affected that choice...either the vim implementation or the hjkl keys as arrow keys.

</comment><comment><USER42> Wait, I thought Rogue popularized hjkl? ;-)

</comment><comment><USER43> Wow, thanks for sharing this. I really thought it was for efficiency. (Well, it is also, obviously).

</comment><comment><USER44> That is the coolest looking thing with a keyboard I've ever seen. I want one.

</comment><comment><USER45> That's a pretty sexy terminal.</comment>


Georgia cops attack wrong home, shoot man, kill his dog, and wound fellow cop - <AUTHOR> http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/sep/01/georgia-police-shoot-man-kill-dog-wrong-house

<comment><AUTHOR> This event is pretty horrendous, and is just today's haul of an endless trickle of similar incidents.

I've been posting a lot of these police insanity articles to HN lately in hopes of stimulating more discussion of what the STEM community can do to mitigate state violence against people. Personally, I think that we as a community would do well to organize into a highly visible/vocal political bloc (which could serve many other purposes as well!) that could be used to buy political influence or media attention.</comment>


Wow. ChaCha Is Raising Another $30 Million  - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/26/wow-chacha-is-raising-another-30-million/ <comment><USER2> This is one of those services where you have to ask: what's the business model? Basically, ChaCha is providing a free service where users can text message questions to them and they pay other people to do searches to get the answer. So, how do they make money? In a decade, we might all have phones good enough to google things for ourselves (rather than texting someone else to do it for us). I can't see why an iPhone or other smartphone user would text a question rather than getting an answer themselves.

Their plan seems to be building their network into a quasi-SPAM like environment where some questions get paid-for answers: "your advertisement will be integrated naturally into the answers users receive". Maybe they mean that in addition to "organic" answers (appended to the end), but SMS only carries 160 characters so that's a tight squeeze.

It's a cool service and great for settling fun bets with your friends or finding information when on the go. However, I guess I don't see how it will become viable especially as more and more people move to smart devices that they could google things on themselves just as easily as asking someone else by text message.

</comment><comment><USER3> i know this has been discussed ad nauseam, but when will "they" learn that forcing a user to create an account is a bad idea? i was intrigued until i tried to ask chacha a question ("will chacha survive the recession?") and it bogarted my answer with a sign-up screen. that's the first and likely the last time i'll make an attempt to try the service.

<comment><USER2> ChaCha is mostly for use by mobile phones - it's kinda a "will you google this for me and get me the answer" service when you aren't at a computer, but can send a text message. In that case, it doesn't require any signup and can be useful enough.</comment></comment>


Show HN: patch that lets w3m users login and post to HN - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/acg/w3m/commit/5946c2784d4eae46ec06e52390e43a874b3395fc I've noticed a few requests to fix HN's http request parsing to allow the "Content-length" (lowercase l) header. This problem prevents users of the w3m web browser and emacs/w3m from logging in and posting. Although "Content-length" is actually legal according to the rfc, it was just easier to patch w3m to send "Content-Length."
http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526429
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132674
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134149 <comment><AUTHOR> I noticed a few requests to fix HN's http parsing to allow the "Content- length" (lowercase l) header. This problem prevents users of the w3m web browser and emacs/w3m from logging in and posting. Although "Content-length" is actually legal according to the rfc, it was just easier to patch w3m to send "Content-Length."

<http://www.arclanguage.org/item?id=4419>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1526429>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2132674>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=134149></comment>


Toyota invests $394m in Joby Aviation's flying taxis - <AUTHOR> https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-15/toyota-invests-394-million-in-joby-aviation-s-flying-taxis <comment><USER2> There are _a lot_ of companies working on "flying taxis".

All of those seem to have a large footprint with lots of rotors, meaning they will need dedicated landing/take off zones.

This seems to limit their usability a lot, turning them more into a short range point to point helicopter service.

Not to mention the noise pollution. Those things are all loud.

Combine that with limited speed and range, and I just don't see the concept taking off in a big way.

Some other competitors:

* Volocopter: [https://www.volocopter.com](https://www.volocopter.com) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OazFiIhwAEs)

* Hyunday S-A1: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6K7GAG1Aas](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6K7GAG1Aas)

* Bell Nexus: [https://www.bellflight.com/products/bell-nexus](https://www.bellflight.com/products/bell-nexus)

* Ehang: [https://www.ehang.com/ehang184/index](https://www.ehang.com/ehang184/index) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d66MoI4GdFs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d66MoI4GdFs)

* Kitty Hawk HeavySide (Larry Page pet project): [https://kittyhawk.aero](https://kittyhawk.aero) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mc3C19kE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7mc3C19kE4)

* Lilium (branded as jet): [https://lilium.com](https://lilium.com) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qotuu8JjQM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qotuu8JjQM)

<comment><USER3> From what I gather most companies in the space plan to land and take off from rooftops. That leaves a lot more options for stations and edges connecting them leading to a denser network than something like a subterranean train which requires dedicated stations with tunnels in between them

<comment><USER4> There's actually examples of this in the world now. In São Paulo, the rich take helicopters between buildings [1].

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/brazil](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/20/brazil)

<comment><USER5> Even so there are only 469 (in 2008 according to the article) in all of São Paulo and that's the metro area with the most helicopters in the world.

I doubt the likes of Hyundai are looking to sell their things "in the hundreds to thousands" range.

It'd a a big change in air traffic and noise pollution.

<comment><USER6> You'd be surprised how far 469 heliports go. That's one more than the number of stations the NY Metro has, which is the metro with the most number of stations in the world. Now imagine you could travel as the crow flies between any station in NYC. That's awesome efficiency, and if you still need you can grab an Uber at street level if you're still not close enough.

You're also not limited to just those 469 heliports. The vertices of the convex hull they produce can all serve as jumping off points to go about a 100 miles further to heliports one may have in ones own home.

For the rich in São Paulo, that may be homes in places like Angra do Reis and Laranjeiras. Even places like those two (which sit between Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, can serve as connection points to jump from São Paulo to Rio de Janeiro with only one or two stops in between the two cities.

When you eliminate the time in traffic traffic to get to Congonhas or Guarulhos and the time spent in airport security, it makes a ton of sense for those with the means. Eventually as the tech progresses and becomes cheaper it will become accessible to more than just the very very rich.

<comment><USER7> No. Seoul Metro has nearly double that of NYC. I have no idea how you could possibly think NYC has the most in the world. Just think of most Chinese cities, let alone Korea's capital. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Metropolitan_Subway](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seoul_Metropolitan_Subway)

<comment><USER8> Also Tokyo, Japan. It's ranked first in the world on subway usage and has 882 railway stations. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway)

<comment><USER9> Actually Tokyo has much less than Seoul. You're counting railway stations, not subway stations. There's a large difference. Though the water is quite muddled, the easiest way is to actually look at the maps of the differing cities.

I was actually very let down by the metro of Tokyo compared to other Asian cities. Probably due to my high expectations.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> If an aircraft can't glide or autorotate then I don't understand how it can be safe at low altitudes. Because whole plane parachutes (BRS) have a minimum altitude required to open successfully, and that altitude is a lot higher than anyone would care to drop.

Airplanes have energy from their forward motion. Helicopters have energy in their rotor blades. This energy can be used to soften a crash landing. Without this available energy, and without a parachute, then how do you soften a crash and survive?

People say that electric motors are so reliable... But batteries can spontaneously combust.

I would like to know how these aircraft are safe enough to be treated the same as a taxi ride.

<comment><USER11> The usual approach is to use a rocket to accelerate parachute deployment so that it's usable at lower altitudes. But even so there may be a "dead zone" in part of the flight envelope.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is pretty much everything you need to know about Toyota - everything you need to know about corporate Japan - wrapped up neatly in one anecdote. Toyota can't make a plug-in electric car to save themselves but for white elephants like flying cars and smart cities they are all in.

<comment><USER13> Uh the Prius Prime and (later this year) RAV4 prime exist or will soon. What's your point?

<comment><USER14> Not OP, but I'm guessing their point is that Toyota has completely missed the boat on electrification where they had an early lead with the Prius.

They went after shiny unrealistic options like Fuel Cells/Hydrogen and wasted their lead. The world would have looked very different now if they had invested in Electric 10 years ago. Their "plug-in" electrics have 20-40 miles of all electric range. Even Ford has vehicles with 200+ miles range.

Instead, they still have only concept vehicles and their exec VP still says "We haven't changed our policy towards battery EVs. We are not shifting our focus to prioritise battery EVs, nor are we abandoning our FCV strategy." source: [https://ww.electrek.co/2019/06/07/toyota-electric-car- images...](https://ww.electrek.co/2019/06/07/toyota-electric-car-images- accelerate-plan/#)

<comment><USER2> I find it very interesting how stubbornly Toyota is sticking to hydrogen/fuel cells. The rest of the market seems to have accepted that the big downsides of hydrogen based solutions (need for extensive transport + storage infrastructure, difficult containment, horrible end to end efficiency, ...) make batteries the better solution.

Tesla seems bound to demonstrate that even semis are already viable with current technology, and battery research is bound to reduce price, weight and longevity further. We may find chemistries that rely less on materials like cobalt, nickel, copper.

Is it pride and inability to accept failure, or are there valid reasons for this and Toyota could still emerge as a big winner?

It seems unlikely to me for personal cars.

Hydrogen seems better suited for energy storage, trains and airplanes.

<comment><USER15> _> Is it pride and inability to accept failure, or are there valid reasons for this and Toyota could still emerge as a big winner?_

Japan (and China, Europe and other regions) are investing in hydrogren based mobility. Japan has a bit over 100 fuel cell stations right now, and aims for over 300 stations and 200k vehicles in 5 years. [0] Toyota is one of the companies creating both the stations and also hydrogen based vehicles. They also sold about 3k of their hydrogen-based Mirai cars [2].

German company Bosch only started hydrogen fuel cell production in 2019 [1].

This is all very miniscule compared to the electic cars of today, but a hydrogen economy has a few important advantages, IMO the most important one is that hydrogen production can occur at times when energy is in abundance, which gets more and more important with rewewables based energy networks. Vehicles can also be fueled just as fast as ICE vehicles today, and hydrogen has much higher energy density than current battery technology.

From a strategic POV it makes sense for countries to look at hydrogen.

[0] [https://www.airliquide.com/magazine/energy- transition/hydrog...](https://www.airliquide.com/magazine/energy- transition/hydrogen-mobility-around-world-japan-germany)

[1] [https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/15/business/corpor...](https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/01/15/business/corporate- business/hydrogen-vehicles-2019-net-zero-emissions/)

[2] [https://www.hindustantimes.com/autos/toyota-nissan-honda- amo...](https://www.hindustantimes.com/autos/toyota-nissan-honda- among-11-automakers-pushing-for-fuel-cell-cars-in- japan/story-9y9Z7bY7biXpSQxUfoeiPL.html)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Every $1 spent on noisy technology should require a $50 investment in tinnitus research.

</comment><comment><USER17> As others have said, building the physical vehicles is a crowded space to enter, whereas there seem to be far fewer ventures involving the enabling infastructure (e.g. 3D spacetime routing/scheduling, monitoring, ledgering).

</comment><comment><USER18> There are already commercial air taxis and helicopter services serving <300km market. Both are barely doing it financially.

Now think how a technical solution grossly inferior to both helicopter and a prop plane will fare in the market.

</comment><comment><USER19> Is it just me or...

Why do we need to have startup founders and car companies try their hand at building a new experimental electric helicopter to validate whether or not the market wants to use helicopters for ride hailing?

</comment><comment><USER20> They can carry five people 150 miles at up to 200 mph on a single charge?

If that's accurate, isn't this a huge step forward for an electric vehicle?

</comment><comment><USER21> One only see a few helicopters at time in typical city skyline.

I wonder what happen if there are just 100 of them on the air at the same time.

<comment><USER22> True. The sound of a single drone is enough to disrupt a nice quiet afternoon sky, imagine 100 multi rotor, large enough to carry multiple people. Like a swarm of giant mosquitoes constantly buzzing around.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> [http://archive.md/7LEjj](http://archive.md/7LEjj)

</comment><comment><USER24> > Joby says it will manufacture prototypes at a facility in Marina, > California, near Monterey, but plans to tap Toyota's famous manufacturing > prowess to build "highly reliable complex hardware at increased scale," said > Paul Sciarra, Joby's executive chairman and a co-founder of Pinterest.

More glorified complexity. I would pay more to ride in something with highly reliable simple hardware.

</comment><comment><USER25> This makes a lot of sense for Toyota. Their hydrogen fuel cells probably make a lot more sense in this context.

<comment><USER13> How would hydrogen make more sense?

<comment><USER26> On a simplistic level, the energy density of hydrogen is far greater than chemical batteries. Less weight to carry the same amount of energy.

This is more complex than I summarised, containing hydrogen effectively being one issue.

<comment><USER27> True, Hydrogen has a far higher energy density than li-ion batteries (~150x). But that doesn't show the entire picture. To store and use that hydrogen, you also need a very strong tank (cause of the high pressure it has to be stored in a vehicle) and a fuel cell stack to generate electrical energy. Taking the example of Toyota's Mirai, the hydrogen tank weighs 90kg to just store 5kg of Hydrogen (at 700bar). And this is despite being made of very expensive carbon fibre. If it was made of cheaper but heavier materials like steel, it would weigh much more. And the fuel cell in Mirai weighs 60kg just to output 114kw (155hp). Add all this up and it is a much more even (~2x, not ~150x) comparison with Li-ion battery (for reference Model 3 battery weighs 480kg). And given all this, not surprising the Mirai weighs (1850kg) more than a Model 3 long range (1725kg) despite having similar range and being far less powerful.

<comment><USER25> Skai VTOL claims to fly for 4 hours vs battery powered Ehang which is around 30m - for a hydrogen vs battery real world comparison. So perhaps there is some difference when these scale up. Their tank is made from stainless steel as well, rather than carbon fibre, so it appears that there is room for improvement there too.

[https://skai.co/hydrogen-details](https://skai.co/hydrogen-details)</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


First hydroxychloroquine randomized controlled trial: results disappointing - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/gcbioinv/status/1242268829906018304 <comment><USER2> For people that didn't read: it's "disappointing" because both the control and study groups largely tested negative (93% and 87% respectively). That 87% figure sounds worse than the control but it actually is better than in the French study.

What happened in essence is that almost all cases were mild so the patients almost all got better after a while, with or without medication. This doesn't mean HCQ is ineffective, only that its efficacy couldn't be measured in this instance. And I wouldn't call a study where almost everyone gets better at the end "disappointing".

<comment><USER3> It's disappointing because it's no better than placebo.

<comment><USER4> In this case (as with many others) placebo is pretty effective, but also, these folks didn't get sick enough to need it, as with the overwhelming majority of young and healthy people. Another, broader study is required. I'm sure we'll find out more soon -- this reads like a mulligan though.

<comment><USER5> any data on what percentage of "young healthy" people die/get hospitalized? also, what's the definition of young and healthy?

<comment><USER6> _Across the United States, 38 percent of those hospitalized were between the ages of 20 and 54._

 _Nationally, 12 percent of the intensive care patients were between the ages of 20 and 44._

[https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/nyregion/nyc- coronavirus-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/nyregion/nyc-coronavirus- young.html)

<comment><USER7> I keep hearing statistics like this and I yell at my TV every time. Counting up the people in the hospital is pretty easy, but it doesn't answer the more important question of how many infected 20-54 require hospitalization. Even comparing those numbers to the larger demographics would be helpful.

<comment><USER6> There are a variety of these sources.

[https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/07/coronaviru...](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2020/03/07/coronavirus- age-specific-fatality-ratio-estimated-using-stan/)

[https://www.statista.com/chart/21173/hospitalization-icu- adm...](https://www.statista.com/chart/21173/hospitalization-icu-admission- and-fatality-rates-for-reported-coronavirus-cases/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Why are we amplifying someone posting a compressed jpeg to 3,000 followers who lists no name, has a photo of George Costanza, and claims to be a virologist?

<comment><USER9> Perhaps they are infinitely more qualified than some of the public figures pushing this treatment as a "game-changer"? Either way, hopefully we'll hear from some well-identified, qualified experts in time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> It is a 30 patients test and almost everybody's fever was gone right after enrollment. Even the swab test results turned negative in 2-4 days. Why is medicine ever needed for such group of patients?

<comment><USER11> The results are disappointing because they are useless. That's how I interpret the headline.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> I am sorry, but isn't the mechanism of action that hydroxychloroquine is simply a zinc ionophore, i.e. you need enough free zinc in the blood for this to work? I read doctors suggesting using hydroxychloroquine along with 50mg of ionic zinc.

<comment><USER13> Like Reelin said, it's effectiveness may be related to it's ability to modulate immune activity by affecting pH.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27927040](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27927040)

Course, that'll only work if the symptoms are being caused by an overactive immune system and it's able to mediate that immune response in time.

<comment><USER4> > Course, that'll only work if the symptoms are being caused by an overactive > immune system and it's able to mediate that immune response in time.

Accumulating evidence suggests that a subgroup of patients with severe COVID-19 might have a cytokine storm syndrome [1]. HCQ is known to moderate this reaction.

[1] [https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...](https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736\(20\)30628-0/fulltext)

<comment><USER13> I'm not sure if it would be able to mitigate a cytokine storm, but it could prevent it. When DW was on it for sepsis due to an auto-inflammatory condition, her progression was much slower than what I've read about cytokine storm.

<comment><USER4> Thanks, I misspoke.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Has anyone found the study they're talking about? This tweet is only a screenshot of the abstract.

And the trials registry entry says "No results published": [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517)

Update: I asked the person on twitter and here it is: [http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43...](http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43f8625d4dc74e42bbcf24795de1c77c.pdf) Apparently it's in chinese.

<comment><USER15> Yes. Two issues...

Median age for the control group and test group was 24yrs and 18yrs respectively. This isn't the ideal sample group for testing this drug for COVID-19 indication.

But more importantly... Dosing was only 400mg once per day versus recommended 500mg twice per day as performed in the French trial.

Taken together, this trial tells us very little on how this drug would perform at proper dosing on severe subjects in vulnerable age range and/or with prior co-morbidities.

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> didnt find a link to the abstract, seems the results are just being published

link to the trial on clinicaltrials.gov is here: [https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517](https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04261517)

patients in both tx and control arm fared better than in the french study from earlier this week, suggesting patients were healthier / lower risk at baseline

patients got slightly lower dose in this study (400 mg / day) vs the french study (600 mg / day)

<comment><USER16> Someone on the Twitter thread linked to this, which seems to be not exactly the same document but contains very similar text in the abstract:

[http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43...](http://subject.med.wanfangdata.com.cn/UpLoad/Files/202003/43f8625d4dc74e42bbcf24795de1c77c.pdf)

I think it helps if you can read Chinese, though Google Translate seems to do a pretty ok job on it.

<comment><USER17> No need to read Chinese, the abstract is on page 2. Conclusion: at current trial size no better than placebo. More study is needed to tease out an effect, if there is any.

<comment><USER18> It does help if you read the translation.

By now everybody should know that the successful dosis is 2x500mg per day for 10 days. Not 1x 400mg per day, which is the old dosis for Malaria prevention. This dosis needs at least 2-3 weeks to be effective (saturate the cell membranes with zinc), and by then the infection is already over. And the Chinese treatment plan contained much more.

A study with zero value.

<comment><USER19> What's the source of this?

<comment><USER18> The official chinese treatment recommendation. [https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fd28s6/preprint_ar...](https://old.reddit.com/r/COVID19/comments/fd28s6/preprint_article_from_the_shanghai_medical/)

Amongst doctors both hydroxychloroquine sulfate and chloroquine phosphate run under broadband antiviral.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Here is actual publication: [http://www.zjujournals.com/med/EN/10.3785/j.issn.1008-9292.2...](http://www.zjujournals.com/med/EN/10.3785/j.issn.1008-9292.2020.03.03)

</comment><comment><USER21> > That was a first run trial without the Zpak. The following trial with both > showed 100% efficacy after 5-6 days.

Is that twitter reply accurate?

<comment><USER22> No, that trial has some glaring flaws. Several threads go into them way better than I could.

[https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1241201751916568576](https://twitter.com/GaetanBurgio/status/1241201751916568576)

[https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/12414295448478638...](https://twitter.com/MicrobiomDigest/status/1241429544847863808)

<comment><USER21> Thank you for the links! I didn't know about those gremlins in the supplementary info. Hopefully the WHO trials recently announced will give us a better answer soon.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> In late January 2020 during the 2019–20 coronavirus outbreak, Chinese medical researchers stated that exploratory research into chloroquine and two other medications, remdesivir and lopinavir/ritonavir, seemed to have "fairly good inhibitory effects" on the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which is the virus that causes COVID-19. Requests to start clinical testing were submitted.[43] Chloroquine had been also proposed as a treatment for SARS, with in vitro tests inhibiting the SARS-CoV virus.[44][45] However, at least one case of self-medication with chloroquine for COVID-19 has caused a fatality, and the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has stated that such self-medication "will cause harm and can lead to death."

Chloroquine has been recommended by Chinese, South Korean and Italian health authorities for the treatment of COVID-19.[47][48] These agencies noted contraindications for people with heart disease or diabetes.[49] Both chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine were shown to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 in vitro, but a further study concluded that hydroxychloroquine was more potent than chloroquine, with a more tolerable safety profile.[50] Preliminary results from a trial suggested that chloroquine is effective and safe in COVID-19 pneumonia, "improving lung imaging findings, promoting a virus-negative conversion, and shortening the disease course."[51] Self-medication with chloroquine has caused one known fatality.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine#COVID-19](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chloroquine#COVID-19)

</comment><comment><USER3> Thank goodness that we are actually getting some RCT results. There has been a huge confirmation bias towards any positive results for chloroquine, no matter how specious or flawed the underlying science was. Everybody wants this to work because the drug is well-tested on humans, cheap, and broadly available. It would be a panacea, a miracle drug. My concern is that the desire for this drug to be effective has clouded people's judgment (even seasoned researchers) and led to bad science.

<comment><USER24> > _It would be a panacea, a miracle drug._

Not really, a panacea is a drug that cures everything. If chloroquine was found to be an effective antiviral, it would only be a drug that cured _two_ things. That's common enough to not warrant excessive skepticism taken alone.

<comment><USER25> While that may be the precise definition of a panacea, the vernacular definition is a breakthrough or unexpected good thing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> It's two samples of 15. 13/15 and 14/15 successes. Much too small to draw any conclusions. It's even noted a larger sample size is needed

</comment><comment><USER27> Wait. I thought that hydroxychloroquine was hypothesized to protect against wet lung, as an anti-inflammatory, and not as an antiviral.

Did I just make that up?

<comment><USER18> No, HCQ is the Antiviral. Anti-inflammatories are also in the plan, but not Iboprofen.

<comment><USER4> Not exactly. HCQ has anti-inflammatory action as well as immune moderating action [1] the latter of which may help protect against cytokine storm which occurs in some serious COVID-19 infections. It also has antiviral action in some situations but it's not clear that that's actually relevant to COVID-19 yet.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroxychloroquine)

<comment><USER27> Thanks. Upon reflecting, I meant to say immune moderating as well as anti- inflammatory. Which is why it's become so popular for treating arthritis.

I wonder about the antiviral activity, though. What I've read is about possibly faster drop in virus levels. And I suppose that HCQ could be interfering with some stage of intracellular virus production. But time will tell.

<comment><USER18> You're mixing it up: CQ Phosphat is the rheuma/arthritis treatment, HCQ Sulfat the malaria prevention drug. CQ has much more severe side-effects, esp. in blacks. HCQ can lead to temporal blindness after years of use. We are talking 10 days here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Not unexpected. A week or two ago a Chinese treatment protocol made the rounds where hydroxychloroquine was suggested as an alternative to HIV protease inhibitors. Since we now know that ritonavir/lopinavir doesn't work well, one wouldn't expect hydroxychloroquine to do any better. If it had remarkable clinical effects _it_ would be the first-line treatment.

</comment><comment><USER28> This is evidence; it isn't great but it also isn't conclusive. We'll need to wait longer for something a little more decisive. A twitter link is also unhelpful because we only get a blurry abstract to go off.

The happy dream is maybe hydroxychloroquine has prophylactic tendencies since it is something people can take long term to be at a substantially lower risk vs catching COVID. The abstract doesn't really show much either way on that front.

Spitballing as an amateur, I suspect once someone has actual symptoms or is verging on a serious case it is too late to help - what is a drug supposed to do, regrow a busted lung? It comes to a point where the virus isn't what is killing you, it is the damage the virus did while breeding and/or the immune system overreacting fighting back and going haywire. Antivirals should help but aren't expected to be magic for either of those things.

<comment><USER29> > The happy dream is maybe hydroxychloroquine has prophylactic tendencies > since it is something people can take long term to be at a substantially > lower risk vs catching COVID.

It's an immune system inhibitor, so this seems like a bad plan.

<comment><USER30> > It's an immune system inhibitor, so this seems like a bad plan.

Not unless the cytokine storm is what ends up killing the patient in the end.

[https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176783/coronavirus- covid-19-...](https://www.vox.com/2020/3/12/21176783/coronavirus- covid-19-deaths-china-treatment-cytokine-storm-syndrome)

Then it may be a good idea. The immune system is a very complex _system_ so some parts may be active and some parts suppressed at the same time and that may be what's need for the fastest recovery.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> It seems like the study was conducted on the complete wrong set of patients.

</comment><comment><USER32> The reported dosage is less than half what the Chinese Government recommends (500mg x 2 (BID)). So it's possible that they didn't hit the effective dose. [https://medium.com/@balajis/the-official-chinese- government-...](https://medium.com/@balajis/the-official-chinese-government- guide-to-diagnosing-and-treating-the-novel-coronavirus-9d06868f8df4)

<comment><USER33> your link is to chloroquine phosphate, which has a phosphate group and is only like 75% chloroquine by weight. So no, not less than half. Moreover, you are trying to compare a hydroxychloroquine dose with a chloroquine phosphate dose (active ingredient is chloroquine, not hydroxychloroquine), which is any one's guess if they even have the same mechanism of action here. Just because they both work against malaria, doesn't mean much about this virus. All in all, it is nearly useless to compare the chloroquine phosphate dose and outcomes to the hydroxychloroquine dose and outcomes.</comment></comment>


Google Contributor - <AUTHOR> https://contributor.google.com/v/beta <comment><USER2> Hmm. There have been other small startups that have tried this, but nothing has really stuck. It seems pretty exclusive too. How can a webmaster of a small independent blog chose to participate?

I'm kinda weary of this entire model. I was really hoping Patreon would do more to disrupt the ad model than anything else and wrote about it a while back:

[https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting- you...](https://penguindreams.org/blog/how-patreon-is-disrupting-youtube-and- other-ad-supported-services/)

...and it's made an impact for sure, but even now Google seems to want to cut Patreon out of their services (you have to have a minimum number of subscribers to add a Patreon button to new videos).

Flattr was another concept in this space that didn't really pan out either.</comment>